Navigation

Heise

Higher Education Institutions for Societal Engagement (HEISE) is a continuation of MAPSI project.

Higher education institutions (HEIs) play a key role in educating young people to understand the underlying values in societies and cultures, which create crucial abilities to foster social integration. To succeed in this, the teachers and students of HEIs need novel ways to increase intercultural understanding and social inclusion. Hence, in the project we aim to create a comprehensive educational model grounded in experiential and challenge based learning to increase the higher education institutions’ societal engagement (HEISE).
The objectives of the HEISE project are to engage the local challenge owners and the HEI students into the joint teams and to apply various arts based methods to make the different views visible in the challenge solving processes.
One of the main results of HEISE project is a comprehensive toolkit for HEI teachers to integrate challenge based learning methods into their teaching. This will further result in greater societal engagement and impact of HEIs. The students and stakeholders of HEI
will be affected by the challenge based learning methods during the course modules organized by the project, which will result in a more active dialogue between them while solving the real-life societal challenges collaboratively. On the other hand, the project has
an impact on the management of HEIs and the way they strategically integrate the societal engagement and impact into their operations. One concrete outcome of this part of the project is to provide a model how to evaluate the societal impact of HEIs. The longer-term benefits of the HEISE project lies in the further development of course contents in which the challenge based learning methods are utilized. In addition, the longer-term impact of systematically evaluating the impact of HEIs will increase the importance of the topic. In a long run this will lead to broader societal engagement of HEIs, which will further affect the ways citizens understand intercultural and social inclusion.